What did you call me?

John McCain was the most innovative and exciting campaigner of the presidential primary season. His positive treatment from the media led one of his aides to observe that the media had been his political base. But now McCain is out of the presidential race, in part because, as Phyllis Schlafly of the conservative Eagle Forum said, “People don’t want to elect an angry candidate.”

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd was even more specific: McCain “called Big Tobacco ‘jerks.’” He ranted that the people running Bob Jones University were “idiots.” He blasted the televangelists of the right as “evil,” and even dubbed his own party establishment the “Death Star.” He mocked his colleagues in Congress by christening Washington the “city of Satan.” Dowd reached back to the Spanish Inquisition to argue that McCain “wasn’t running a campaign so much as an auto-da-fé, with himself as the martyr in the flames.”